Since there were seventy-one sponsors, it was inevitable that the resolution would be adopted, But debate on the question was inevitably bitter and spilled over to the substance of the Palestinian issue. For many people the debate—and Arafat's subsequent address to the General Assembly—sharpened questions about the United Nations, its purpose, and its long-term value.

From its birth the United Nations has been an important weapon in the armory of nations in conflict. When one's national ends are advanced, the U.N. is seen as the expression of man's highest ideals. Victims, however, perceive attacks in the world forum as irresponsible distortions of the Charter. From either perspective the United Nations is an arena for combat.

What are the political, social, and moral obligations of a social scientist? How sure, for example, must a peace researcher be before advocating a particular policy? When does he or she pass over the line from the faithful searcher after truth to the possibly erring committed citizen? Questions worth exploring.

The government official is at one extreme on a continuum running from social theory to social action. The official's responsibility is to act, and in a modern industrial society the acts of a senior official can have enormous impact on the lives, the liberties, and the happiness off citizens. The official knows this and the citizens know it.

In commenting on the Hartford Appeal Gregory Baum made some very thoughtful observations on some of my own work. I shall limit myself here to replying to these observations, though, by implication, my reply touches on several points made by other commentators. I would also like to say that I am very grateful to Baum: Few things are as gratifying to an author as having a critic who understands him.

Baum very ably puts his finger on two persisting tensions in my work—the tension between transcendence and humanism on the one hand, and the tension between a radically debunking perspective on society and a distrust of revolutionary ideologies on the other. These tensions, I believe, are not just personal idiosyncractes of mine, but rather are inherent in the phenomena at issue. The same tensions are to be found in the Hartford Appeal.

To understand history we must first unlearn it. Or, more accurately, we must unlearn canonized history. That is certainly the case if we are to understand U.S. entry into World War II—the last “good war” the United States fought; perhaps the only war not yet subjected fully to the revision of opinion that has been the lot of other contemporary wars. Bruce Russett's No Clear and present Danger. A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry Into World War II takes us a long way in examining critically whether U.S. entry into that war was justified, yet it received much less attention than it deserved when it appeared in 1972.

In the final years of Portugal's old regime much of the non-Communist opposition came to equate the idea of anti-Communism with cold warriorism. The Soviet Union and the people's democracies tended to be seen as generally progressive forces. The chief enemy of the world's oppressed peoples was American imperialism. The United States, the land of napalm and the CIA, was seen to be the paramount exploiter of the suffering Third World—a view not incompatible with the Old Right's vision of the U.S. as die home of moneygrubbing Calvintst gumchewers.

It is not historical fact, claims, and interpretations vying for credence against counterfact, claims, and interpretations that have determined the course of events in Palestine. Rather it is how Israelis and Palestinians over the years have come to perceive their reality and how each has built a whole body of active mythology to give outer shape to its maturing energies. Each of the two peoples is molded by its historical experiences it has first internalized and then projected in varieties of expression. The substance of what is right, who is right, becomes subordinated to, or is preceded by, the texture and contours of a person's sense of otherness, the force and quality of his sense of oppression.